Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Advent Novena 2012

I
will be praying the Saint Andrew novena again this Advent season. If
you're not familiar with this practice, it involves saying the following
prayer fifteen times a day, from Saint Andrew's feast day, November 30,
until December 24:

Hail,
and blessed be the hour and moment at which the Son of God was born of a
most pure Virgin in a stable at midnight in Bethlehem in the piercing
cold. At that hour, vouchsafe, I beseech Thee, to hear my prayers and
grant my desires (mention your intentions here). Through Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother.

I
have some very pressing and difficult personal intentions that I will
be praying for. I also have a tradition of praying for the intentions of
others into whose friendship God has led me through the mysterious ties
of the interwebs. If you would like me to add your intentions to my
novena, please leave a note in the combox.

Also, please pray for our little Jude, who has to have surgery on Saint Andrew's feast day, November 30.

2 comments:

I am praying for you and your intentions, and especially for Jude as his surgery approaches.

Would you please remember my uncle, my mother's younger brother, who's had pulmonary fibrosis for some years now and has just been told that his condition has deteriorated to the point of his needing a lung transplant? He and my aunt are going to the Mayo Clinic this week for a second opinion/discussion of options, but he does not *feel* well enough to withstand the surgery. We'll see what the Mayo doctors say.

Also, I mentioned this kind of in passing on my own blog last week, but the sister of a dear lifelong friend of mine has been battling a severe viral lung infection and has been in the ICU in critical condition. She has ulcerative colitis, as well as a clotting disorder (they thought at first that her shortness of breath was an embolism), and the meds she is on ordinarily have made her extremely immune-compromised. I haven't heard an update in several days, but her sister did say that the doctors were "hopeful but realistic," which I think meant that *if* she recovered, and they were holding out some hope that she would, it would be a long, hard road.